I don't often speak in my burlesque acts. In the Allo Allo act I lip-synch to my own voice in a stupid French accent, in the Amelia Earhart act I lip-synch to her recorded voice, and an the act I made most recently in 2014 I speak into a mic at the start. So my voice isn't a tool I use very often. There's something very exposing about speaking to an audience, even more so with singing. I'm interested in the use of voice - I've been a LAMDA solo acting coach with young people for many years, so I've worked with plenty of voices. But I didn't enjoy the voice classes at LISPA. For me, the teaching style involved a lot of pushing and risk, in order to help discover new pathways for the voice, and this wasn't always carried out safely. But that's not to say I'm adverse to finding the flexibility in your own voice, and discovering sounds that you never knew you could make - and I set out to find my own way of encouraging this with the other performers and collaborators who worked with me on my final piece at LISPA.

Every time a critic or fan writes about a Tom Waits gig or album, they usually begin by writing about his voice. It is a distinctive voice, and it's strange how something which appears so damaged and broken can sound so tender. The voice is flexible too; he can contort it, and place it in different parts of his body in order to create a sound that works as part of the melody and rhythm. In one of the workshops I ran to research for the Tom Waits ensemble piece, I focused specifically on voice, and having dug out my notes, the exercises went something like this...

'Like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.'

Vocal Gymnastics / Percussion
Chick-a-boom / Ah
Boom / Ah
Kak-Kow
(Try in two groups, and then swap over without disrupting the rhythm)

'Small Change got rained on with his own 38.'

Experiment with Volume 1-5, Pitch 1-5 and Rhythm 1-5. This is a useful exercise and really easy. You take a line and say is as quietly as possible - without it being a stage whisper - then as loudly as you can - without shouting and wrecking your voice: These are known as 1 and 5. You find the middle of soft and loud - this is the 3, and then you experiment until you find the 2 and 4. You then repeat this with Pitch - High/Low and Rhythm - Fast/Slow. What you may notice is if you speed up your delivery, then your volume increases, and sometimes at the extremes of pitch the volume and rhythm is affected - how can the performer stay in control of these variables, and ultimately select the optimal Rhythm, Pitch and Volume to successfully communicate the intended meaning of the line?

Mouth Metaphors

Deliver your line like...
* A cynical children's story
* a 1955 cadillac revving it's engine
* A rusty nail, stirring brandy
* Pink wind
* Dragging a dead priest
* Electric sugar
* Black summer heat
* The far away yelping of a wounded dog
* A long distance phone call
* Oily night
* Drunk on the moon
* A rope of sand

Waits writes in very striking metaphors, and the words are selected as much for their musicality as their meaning. And so I was interested in whether a strong visual, poetic or visceral image could inspire a performer to push their voice to a new place. The point isn't exact representation - how would we do that??' But we can play with rhythm and technique for only so long, before the imagination wants to get involved!

What was useful to us when we began working on the spoken word section of the piece (An edited version of 'Potter's Field', that we performed as Beat poets to a walking bass soundtrack) was that it opened us up to some new possibilities in a vocal and aural sense, and we didn't get trapped in imitation and contriving.

For the solo piece I am interested in exploring how to channel Waits's voice, how he can speak through me, and how I can use his vocal style to embellish my own voice, and the story I wish to tell.

So it's been a long time since I last added anything to this blog, and life has taken a few sharp turns for me lately. A while ago I posted on facebook, asking if anyone knew of any theatre-making blogs. I got a few leads, but nothing like I was hoping for. It's occurred to me recently that I could write here about my progress on a terrifying solo project I've talked myself into. It's a continuation of the piece I made for my final project at LISPA in July 2014, which was born from a solo improvisation that I performed at the end of the first year of training.

There is, I believe, a famous Lecoq exercise, whereby the students enters as a professor or expert in the specialist subject of their choice, and addresses the audience as though they were about to give a lecture. As the actor talks about the subject, they gradually become more physically involved, until they are the embodiment of the subject. Embodiment is a difficult one to explain, though it was the one thing we got plenty of practise at - you name it, we embodied it!
I thought for ages about what my specialist subject could be, as I watched my classmates get up one by one and go through the process publicly, and all sorts of subjects embodied, from American football to the Evolutionary process. And the only subject that I could speak decidedly and passionately about was Tom Waits, he was in my ears every day on my long commute. The memory of my improvisation is foggy, but it definitely set something off, and through the ensemble piece that I performed a year later with four pals, and workshopped with several more, I've decided to get something going under my own steam in 2016 - and we'll add the ensemble back in later!

I've been working on a kind of script / structure / dramaturgy since October 2015, and reflecting on the creative process at times, and I finished a script outline earlier this evening, which I fully expect to change over the year. I'll be performing little snippets from about March onwards, attempting Edinburgh previews in July, and then the first three weeks of the Fringe. It's going to be crazy, and I'll be logging some of it here!